James Di Virgilio talks to Daniel Barousse, the founder of Slice, a company that makes components for 3D printers that help improve their performance. Daniel and his co-founder Chris Montgomery literally started in a garage, tinkering their way to solutions to problems they encountered with 3D printers at work. In just over a year of existence, Slice is now distributing its product in 12 countries.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

For Radio Cade, I'm James de Virgilio. My guest today is Daniel Barousse. He is the CEO and co-founder of Slice Engineering. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Barousse: 0:48

Thanks for having me.

James Di Virgilio: 0:49

Now, it says on your website and elsewhere, that what you do is you supercharge 3D printer technology. What does that actually mean?

Daniel Barousse: 0:58

We're a manufacturer we design and manufacture components for 3D printers. Your PC has an Intel sticker on it. More than likely Intel makes the chip that goes inside of your computer, your , for your PC. So we're doing similar things for 3D printers. We're making components for 3D printers, specifically ones that help to improve the performance either with higher temperature materials or more capable engineering grade materials, or allow you to print faster, better resolution, things like that.

James Di Virgilio: 1:25

Well, let's talk about 3D printers for a second. This is a topic that confuses and confounds me. Cause when I think of 3D printer, I still think of like trying to print something out and now comes a sheet of paper with things on it. It's called a printer, but what really is a 3D printer? What is it capable of? Is the sky the limit here? I mean, what is this device that you're improving?

Daniel Barousse: 1:45

So one of the cool things about 3D printing is that you mentioned limits. Essentially the limit is sort of your imagination. Anything you can design on a computer with CAD, you can pretty much 3D print and turn into a physical object. So that's really the appeal, especially for like a DIY consumer type person. They've made me have an idea of, Oh, I want to create a new product or I want to just make a bracket for something in my garage. If you can think of it and design it in a computer, you can pull the real object in your hand within a few hours. So that's pretty amazing in terms of what it is. If you imagine plastic being on a spool, like a spool of thread, and then that plastic being fed through a hot glue gun, the hot glue gun would melt the plastic and then squirted out onto what's called the build plate or like a sheet of paper, basically where the object is being created. And instead of doing it in two dimensions, it builds it in three. So the build plate goes down or the hot glue gun it's called the hot end goes up and builds layer upon layer until you come out with a 3D object at the end.

James Di Virgilio: 2:45

So if I want to print a bumper for a car, this can be done?

Daniel Barousse: 2:49